Reporter's Notebook

Every presidential campaign is full of unpredictable twists and turns. After a brief moment where it looked like the nation might slouch into a Bush-Clinton rematch, the 2016 election is taking its place in that line of strange journeys. The one sure thing: There will be gaffes.

Knowing that the range of gaffes is wide, and that the import of a gaffe is often inflated (or overlooked) early on, Gaffe Track is The Atlantic’s bid to cover these gaffes with a consistent approach, creating a nearly real-time chronological inventory of the missteps, miscalculations, and misstatements of the 2016 presidential campaign.

The gaffe: Jake Anantha is an 18-year-old Charlotte, North Carolina, man who is half-Indian and was, until Thursday night, a fervent Trump supporter looking forward to casting his first vote for president for the Republican. But when he went to Trump’s rally in Charlotte, he was ejected—he believes because of the color of his skin. “I told him I've never been to another rally in my life. I’m a huge Trump supporter. I would never protest against Trump,” he told CNN. “I do think it’s because I’m brown.”

The defense: Security told Anantha that he looked just like a man who’d caused trouble at previous ralli...—wait, no, that doesn’t actually make it any better.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): On a basic level, it’s not a good idea to alienate your supporters, especially when you’re already down by several points in the polls. (Anantha now says he’ll perhaps vote for Gary Johnson.) The incident offers ammunition to anyone who thinks the Trump campaign is driven by racial resentment and dislike of minorities. On the plus side, Trump doesn’t really have enough minority supporters for this to make a dent.

The lesson: If you support candidates who back racial profiling, you might get racially profiled at their rallies.

The gaffe: Who’s that standing behind the Democratic nominee during a rally in Kissimmee, Florida? Oh, just Seddique Mateen, the father of Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen and a man who has espoused pro-Taliban and anti-gay views, in addition to peculiar statements suggesting he holds some power in Afghanistan.

The defense: In a statement to WPTV, the Clinton campaign said, “The rally was a 3,000-person, open-door event for the public. This individual wasn't invited as a guest and the campaign was unaware of his attendance until after the event.” (Mateen also said he had just decided to go.)

Why it matters (or doesn’t): This isn’t a major gaffe by the candidate, but it’s sort of baffling. Sure, events are open to the public, but how did staffers allow their boss to get in a situation where she was standing in front of Mateen, sitting somewhat prominently in the grandstand? He’s not the name you want in headlines with Hillary Clinton. Perhaps Trump was right: “We have no idea where they come from, we have no idea who the hell they are. We know they believe in certain things that we don’t want to believe in.”

The gaffe: On Wednesday, the Republican nominee talked about watching a video of American officials unloading cash in Iran. The cash was real—a Wall Street Journal scoop revealed it—but there was no video. Trump’s spokeswoman admitted that to The Washington Post, saying he was referring to a different video. And yet on Thursday, Trump once again claimed to have watched the video. “I woke up yesterday and I saw $400 million—different currencies, they probably don’t want our currency—being flown to Iran,” he said in Maine on Thursday. “You know it was interesting, because a tape was made, with the airplane coming in, nice airplane, and the money coming off I guess. That was given to us, has to be, by the Iranians. You know why the tape was given to us? Because they want to embarrass our country.”

The defense: The first time Trump made the claim, it was plausible he was just confused. But now?

Why it matters (or doesn’t): There are two possibilities, neither especially flattering. One is that the campaign knows Trump is mistaken, but no one bothered to tell the candidate, leaving him to make a public gaffe. Another is that Trump knows quite well and doesn’t care. It takes a special sort of brazenness, and a certain kind of faith in one’s base, and probably a certain sort of delusion about how politics works, to assume that you can get away with lying about this. It’s not the first time Trump has claimed to have seen a video that didn’t exist—like when he described tape of Muslims supposedly celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey. So maybe Trump really does believe he saw the tape. Which isn’t a good sign either.

The gaffe: Speaking in Omaha on Tuesday, the Democrat said, “Trump wants to cut taxes for the super rich,” she said, to boos. “Well, we’re not going there, my friends. I’m telling you right now, we’re going to write fairer rules for the middle class and we”—here’s where things get interesting. Some people heard what she said as “are going to raise taxes for the middle class.” But on a closer listen, she’s clearly saying “aren’t.”

The defense: Even if Clinton had said “are,” it would be a clear slip of the tongue, not a declaration of policy. Clinton has promised not to raised taxes on anyone making up to $250,000—significantly higher than most reasonable definitions of the middle class, although anti-tax groups argue she’d do so anyway through backdoor methods.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): Some conservatives will take this as a Kinsley gaffe, the classic variety in which a candidate accidentally tells the truth, but substantively, there’s not much here. Not since Fritz Mondale has a Democratic candidate been willing to say he or she will raise taxes on the middle class, and Mondale got shellacked. Clinton’s not about to emulate him.

The gaffe: Speaking to Fox News’ Chris Wallace on July 30, Clinton said of her email scandal, “[FBI] Director [James] Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.” Except as The Washington Post explains, that’s not what he said at all. While Comey said Clinton had not lied to the FBI and recommended against charging her, he was also clear that she had emailed classified material.

The defense: Clinton is right that Comey deemed her not to have lied to the FBI, at least.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): As my colleague Ron Fournier writes, Clinton’s insistence on continuing to lie about what Comey said is puzzling. Even as she has apologized for using the server and escaped indictment, she apparently can’t bring herself to simply eat crow and move on, and instead misstates easily available facts. For a candidate already facing serious trust issues with much of the electorate, that seems unwise. Luckily for her, Trump has decided to launch a feud with Gold Star parents, propose appeasing Putin, and say the election is rigged, distracting a great deal of attention.

The lesson: Keep it straight and the election could be signed, sealed, and delivered to Clinton. Otherwise, the fact-check is in the email.

The gaffe:USA Today’s Kirsten Powers asked Trump about the allegations of sexual harassment that toppled Fox News honcho Roger Ailes. When Trump downplayed them, she asked how he’d feel if his daughter was harassed. “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” he said. Tuesday morning, Trump’s son Eric tried to clean it up. While saying harassment should be reported and dealt with, he added, “I don’t think she would allow herself to be subjected to that.”

The defense: The Republican has said he “would be the best for women” and that “Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!”

Why it matters (or doesn’t): As Powers notes, Trump’s answer falls short for several reasons. It overlooks the fact that not all women can easily just leave a job. Moreover, it pushes the illegality of harassment off to the side, while placing the burden to rectify the situation on victims of sexual harassment. Eric Trump’s answer, meanwhile, implies that victims of harassment are somehow not “strong.” These sorts of statements matter because they’re liable to alienate women, a group with which Trump already trails badly—57-43 in a recent CNN poll; his unfavorable rating with women is even worse.

The lesson: Don’t blame the victim, especially if the victim is a voter.

The gaffe:Speaking to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump said of Russian President Vladimir Putin, “He's not going into Ukraine, OK? Just so you understand. He's not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down and you can put it down, you can take it anywhere you want.” Stephanopoulos pointed out that Russia had already annexed Crimea. The response was classic Trump: This is all proof of how terrible Obama is, but also it’s not really so bad. He confirmed that he would consider recognizing the annexation: “But, you know, the people of Crimea, from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.”

The defense: It’s Obama’s fault, or something.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): At first glance, this looks like a classic example of Trump just not really knowing what he’s talking about, a trait that endears him to supporters (he’s a non-politician!) and terrifies opponents (he’s dangerously ignorant!). But on closer glance, this is evidence of Trump’s radically different approach to foreign policy. In his worldview, Russia seizing sovereign territory in violation of international law is acceptable. He even parrots the Kremlin line that Crimeans have a right to self-determination—further evidence of a close alignment between Putin and Trump.

The lesson: A politician shouldn’t Kiev his opponents ammunition with unforced errors—but then again, the only Sebastopol that matters is on election day.

The gaffe: On Thursday, Khizr Khan, the father of slain U.S. Army solider Humayun Khan, delivered the most memorable moment of either party convention. Speaking at the DNC, Khan said, “Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son ‘the best of America.’ If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America.” Khan continued asked whether Trump had ever read the Constitution and said, “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.” Asked about that by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump first questioned why Khizr Khan’s wife Ghazala did not speak. “If you look at his wife, she was standing there,” he said. “She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. Then Trump said he’d sacrificed: “I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I've done, I've had tremendous success.” A somewhat incredulous Stephanopoulos asked if those were really sacrifices. “Oh, sure. I think they're sacrifices,” Trump said.

The defense: The Trump campaign sent out the full transcript of his remarks Sunday, suggesting they were exculpatory. Not so much.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): At this early stage, this looks like one of the rare gaffes that might stick. Khizr Khan’s speech was devastating, with a grieving immigrant father whose son died for the United States calling Trump out for proposing a ban on Muslims entering the country. Trump’s response was to make a snarky remark (for the record, Ghazala Khan, who has spoken in interviews, said she was too emotional to speak) and then to claim, incredibly, that having a successful business career was somewhat an equivalent sacrifice to having a son die in combat. (Trump, a non-veteran, once likened his quest to avoid STDs to the Vietnam War.) The comment speaks for itself, but not in a good way. Just wait: Trump might still make it worse. Sunday morning, he defended his right to counterpunch at Khan Sunday morning:

I was viciously attacked by Mr. Khan at the Democratic Convention. Am I not allowed to respond? Hillary voted for the Iraq war, not me!

The defense: Trump seems to have been confusing Kaine with Tom Kean, a Republican who was Garden State governor, and whose name is pronounced “cane.” No word on the whereabouts of Herman Cain.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): This is one of the more ephemeral gaffes, and pales in importance compared to his bizarre plea to Russia. (The whole press conference was weird.) Mostly, it suggests Trump either can’t or doesn’t care to master the details of politics.

The lesson: If you’re going for a Kaine break, be careful you don’t graze Kean instead.

The gaffe: On July 2, Trump tweeted out an image featuring Hillary Clinton’s face over a background of cash, with a six-pointed star reading “Most corrupt candidate ever.” Many people immediately recognized this as an anti-Semitic dogwhistle, as the six-pointed Star of David is a symbol of Judaism. Trump deleted the tweet, then resent the same image with the star changed to a circle.

The defense: Trump argues that it was a sheriff’s badge, or perhaps a “basic” six-pointed star. But a sheriff’s badge wouldn’t make any sense in this context. There’s also the small problem that the image appears to have originated in a neo-Nazi-frequented message board, then traveled to an anti-Semitic Twitter account before being picked up by Trump.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): Trump’s tweet has produced a heated debate over whether Trump is anti-Semitic. That argument is to a certain extent beside the point. It’s hard—though some diehards are finding ways—to ignore the pattern of Trump encouraging anti-Semitic and other racist elements, regardless of whether Trump himself bears any personal animus toward Jews. (One of his staunch defenders at this moment is his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is Jewish.) Time and again, Trump has tweeted or retweeted material that originated with white supremacists. There was also, of course, the moment where he declined to condemn an endorsement from former KKK leader David Duke, and later tried to blame it on a bad earpiece. (Duke helpfully insists the star was a Star of David, by the way.) The white supremacists are certainly convinced that Trump is speaking to them with a wink and a nudge. In any case, Trump shows no remorse.

The gaffe: Speaking in Raleigh, North Carolina, last night, Trump found the positive side of the late repressive, genocidal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. "He was a bad guy—really bad guy. But you know what? He did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn't read them the rights. They didn't talk. They were terrorists. Over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism.”

The defense: There’s a coherent case that toppling Saddam was a grave error because it destabilized the Middle East and led to sectarian wars, broader regional dysfunction, and ISIS. Also, the Harvard remark is kind of hilarious trolling coming from a Penn grad.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): Here’s a handy, one-word guide for presidential candidates on when to praise Saddam Hussein: “Never.” Whatever the case to be made that toppling Saddam was a bad idea, it’s not really the case Trump made. Instead, he praised a war criminal for his handling of enemies, and a known sponsor of terrorism for his killing of terrorists. (When Henry Kissinger makes the case for cozying up to repressive dictators because of American self-interest, he’s revered as a wise statesman, but when Trump does it, everyone is appalled—though maybe that says more about Kissinger than about Trump.) This isn’t the first time Trump has argued the world would be better off with Saddam in power, and it’s not even the first time he’s made the “Harvard of Terrorism” joke. But once again, the Republican has managed to trip on his own feet, distracting from condemnation of Hillary Clinton’s email. It’s a weird comment to make in North Carolina, a state with many Iraq veterans, though he also suggested in Greensboro that U.S. soldiers siphoned reconstruction funds. Anyway, all of this would ring a lot more true if Trump had been opposed to the Iraq war from the start. But despite his claims, he clearly supported it.

The lesson: Praising Saddam can make a candidate’s image go from Baath to worse.

The gaffe: On Monday, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law restricting abortion clinics, a landmark in the decades-long battle over abortion. Yet Donald Trump was strangely quiet, not saying anything about the decision, which upset many Republicans. On Thursday, he finally weighed in. “Now if we had [the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia was living or if Scalia was replaced by me, you wouldn’t have had that. Okay? It would’ve been the opposite,” the presumptive GOP nominee said in a radio interview. The problem here is that the ruling was decided 5-3, so that either with a live Scalia or a Trump appointee, the math doesn’t add up.

The defense: The Court isn’t always subject to simple math—a jurist as brilliant as Scalia could perhaps have convinced another justice to join him—but there’s no indication that’s what Trump meant.

Why it matters (or doesn’t): The Supreme Court vacancy remains one of Trump's most potent talking points. Even some conservatives who fiercely dislike him would rather have him appointing justices than Hillary Clinton, who could hand lifetime appointments to liberals with long-reaching consequences. So it’s not a surprise that Trump would speak strongly about it. Still, the delay in response, followed by a questionable comment, can’t instill much confidence about his understanding of the justice system. Not that he’s alone: Bernie Sanders and Mike Huckabee have also delivered some howlers about how the Supreme Court works during this election cycle.

The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Updated at 10:20 a.m. ET on May 25, 2019.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In war, the temptation to take revenge is strong. Fighting that temptation is a commanding officer’s job.

“We fight with the values that we represent; we don’t adopt those of our enemy.” This is what I told the Marines standing in a loose semicircle around me on our forward operating base outside Karmah, Iraq, one day in December 2008. “If we lose sight of that, we’ve got nothing left.” I meant every word. For many of us it was becoming harder to make sense of the war in Iraq, but we needed to believe that we were fighting for something. Most could articulate a version of that argument themselves during squad-level discussions back in Hawaii, but now it was hard to tell what impact my words were having. I watched the familiar faces as I spoke. Some nodded, others looked at the ground, shifting their feet on the gravel or gazing back impassively, their expressions a reflection of the gray skies and drizzling rain.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

Naturopaths have long been obsessed with a gene called MTHFR. Now vaccine skeptics are testing for it too.

David Reif, now a biologist at NC State, realized his old paper had taken on a dangerous second life when he saw it cited—not in the scientific literature, but in a court case.

The paper was titled “Genetic Basis for Adverse Events after Smallpox Vaccination,” and it came up in 2016 when a vaccine-skeptical doctor tried to argue that it explained her patient’s development delays. The court was not persuaded, but Reif’s co-authors began hearing of yet other doctors using DNA tests to exempt patients from vaccines. Just this month, San Francisco’s city attorney subpoenaed a doctor accused of giving illegal medical exemptions from vaccination, based on “two 30-minute visits and a 23andMe DNA test.” On anti-vaccine blogs and websites, activists have been sharing step-by-step instructions for ordering 23andMe tests, downloading the raw data, and using a third-party app to analyze a gene called MTHFR. Certain MTHFR mutations, they believe, predispose kids to bad reactions to vaccines, possibly even leading to autism—a fear unsupported by science.

Just as the anti-vaccination movement feeds off a handful of fringe outsiders, long-standing stereotypes about Jews have found a new vector in the latest outbreak of the disease.

As the measles has spread in and around New York, so has anti-Semitism.

Amid an outbreak largely attributed to the anti-vax movement, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disclosed that, as of mid-May, 880 cases have been confirmed nationwide in 2019, “the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1994 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000.” Since September 2018, 535 cases have been confirmed in Brooklyn and Queens alone, largely concentrated in Orthodox Jewish communities. Another 247 cases have been confirmed in Rockland County, north of New York City, also largely among Orthodox Jews.

The spread of measles is matched by a twin pathology. Since the start of the latest measles outbreak last fall, the Anti-Defamation League has seen a spike in reports of harassment specifically related to measles, yet another expression of rising anti-Semitism in the U.S.: pedestrians crossing the street to get away from visibly Jewish people, bus drivers barring Jews from boarding, and people tossing out slurs such as “dirty Jew.”

“Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy,” and 29 other lessons from seeing my Harvard class of 1988 all grown up

On the weekend before the opening gavel of what’s being dubbed the Harvard affirmative-action trial, a record-breaking 597 of my fellow members of the class of ’88 and I, along with alumni from other reunion classes, were seated in a large lecture hall, listening to the new president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, address the issue of diversity in the admissions process. What he said—and I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t record it—was that he could fill five whole incoming classes with valedictorians who’d received a perfect score on the SAT, but that’s not what Harvard is or will ever be. Harvard tries—and succeeds, to my mind—to fill its limited spots with a diversity not only of race and class but also of geography, politics, interests, intellectual fields of study, and worldviews.

Smith College’s annual commencement ceremony begins like any other: Graduating seniors at the women’s liberal-arts college are called up one by one to collect their diploma from the president. Perhaps some students exchange a wink with the regalia-clad honorary-degree recipients nearby as they stride across a platform overlooking the dorms they’d for years called home; others may pause to flip their cap’s tassel while blowing a kiss to the sea of parents who have long awaited this milestone commemorating their daughter’s metamorphosis from undergraduate to alumna.

Except the moment, technically, hasn’t happened quite yet: The name, degree, and accolades printed inside each padded holder seldom belong to the woman who receives it. They very likely belong, rather, to one of her nearly 700 classmates.

SpaceX and its competitors plan to envelop the planet with thousands of small objects in the next few years.

In 1957, a beach-ball-shaped satellite hurtled into the sky and pierced the invisible line between Earth and space. As it rounded the planet, Sputnik drew an unseen line of its own, splitting history into distinct parts—before humankind became a spacefaring species, and after. “Listen now for the sound that will forevermore separate the old from the new,” one NBC broadcaster said in awe, and insistent that others join him. He played the staccato call from the satellite, a gentle beep beep beep.

Decades later, we are not as impressed with satellites. There have been thousands of other Sputniks. Instead of earning front-page stories, satellites stitch together the hidden linings of our daily lives, providing and powering too many basic functions to list. They form a kind of exoskeleton around Earth, which is growing thicker every year with each new launch.

To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands.

To feel relief at my mother’s being dead was once unthinkable, but then the news came from Ireland. It would have crushed her. An immigrant’s daughter, my mother lived with an eye cast back to the old country, the land against which she measured every virtue. Ireland was heaven to her, and the Catholic Church was heaven’s choir. Then came the Ryan Report.

Not long before The Boston Globe began publishing its series on predator priests, in 2002—the “Spotlight” series that became a movie of the same name—the government of Ireland established a commission, ultimately chaired by Judge Sean Ryan, to investigate accounts and rumors of child abuse in Ireland’s residential institutions for children, nearly all of which were run by the Catholic Church.

The president has been intervening in the process of producing a border wall, on behalf of a favored firm.

Updated at 10:20 a.m. ET on May 25, 2019.

Many of the tales of controversy to emerge from the Trump administration have been abstract, or complicated, or murky. Whenever anyone warns about destruction of “norms,” the conversation quickly becomes speculative—the harms are theoretical, vague, and in the future.

This makes new Washington Post reporting about President Donald Trump’s border wall especially valuable. The Post writes about how Trump has repeatedly pressured the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security to award a contract for building a wall at the southern U.S. border to a North Dakota company headed by a leading Republican donor.

The story demonstrates the shortcomings of Trump’s attempt to bring private-sector techniques into government. It shows his tendency toward cronyism, his failures as a negotiator, and the ease with which a fairly primitive attention campaign can sway him. At heart, though, what it really exemplifies is Trump’s insistence on placing performative gestures over actual efficacy. And it is a concrete example—almost literally—of how the president’s violations of norms weaken the country and waste taxpayer money.

In war, the temptation to take revenge is strong. Fighting that temptation is a commanding officer’s job.

“We fight with the values that we represent; we don’t adopt those of our enemy.” This is what I told the Marines standing in a loose semicircle around me on our forward operating base outside Karmah, Iraq, one day in December 2008. “If we lose sight of that, we’ve got nothing left.” I meant every word. For many of us it was becoming harder to make sense of the war in Iraq, but we needed to believe that we were fighting for something. Most could articulate a version of that argument themselves during squad-level discussions back in Hawaii, but now it was hard to tell what impact my words were having. I watched the familiar faces as I spoke. Some nodded, others looked at the ground, shifting their feet on the gravel or gazing back impassively, their expressions a reflection of the gray skies and drizzling rain.

An ancient faith is disappearing from the lands in which it first took root. At stake is not just a religious community, but the fate of pluralism in the region.

T

he call came in 2014, shortly after Easter. Four years earlier, Catrin Almako’s family had applied for special visas to the United States. Catrin’s husband, Evan, had cut hair for the U.S. military during the early years of its occupation of Iraq. Now a staffer from the International Organization for Migration was on the phone. “Are you ready?” he asked. The family had been assigned a departure date just a few weeks away.

“I was so confused,” Catrin told me recently. During the years they had waited for their visas, Catrin and Evan had debated whether they actually wanted to leave Iraq. Both of them had grown up in Karamles, a small town in the historic heart of Iraqi Christianity, the Nineveh Plain. Evan owned a barbershop near a church. Catrin loved her kitchen, where she spent her days making pastries filled with nuts and dates. Their families lived there: her five siblings and aging parents, his two brothers.

In theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans. The mega-retailer’s boundless inventory gives people easy access to household supplies and other everyday products that are rarely fun to shop for. Most people probably aren’t eager to buy clothes hangers, for instance. They just want to have hangers when they need them.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

Naturopaths have long been obsessed with a gene called MTHFR. Now vaccine skeptics are testing for it too.

David Reif, now a biologist at NC State, realized his old paper had taken on a dangerous second life when he saw it cited—not in the scientific literature, but in a court case.

The paper was titled “Genetic Basis for Adverse Events after Smallpox Vaccination,” and it came up in 2016 when a vaccine-skeptical doctor tried to argue that it explained her patient’s development delays. The court was not persuaded, but Reif’s co-authors began hearing of yet other doctors using DNA tests to exempt patients from vaccines. Just this month, San Francisco’s city attorney subpoenaed a doctor accused of giving illegal medical exemptions from vaccination, based on “two 30-minute visits and a 23andMe DNA test.” On anti-vaccine blogs and websites, activists have been sharing step-by-step instructions for ordering 23andMe tests, downloading the raw data, and using a third-party app to analyze a gene called MTHFR. Certain MTHFR mutations, they believe, predispose kids to bad reactions to vaccines, possibly even leading to autism—a fear unsupported by science.

Just as the anti-vaccination movement feeds off a handful of fringe outsiders, long-standing stereotypes about Jews have found a new vector in the latest outbreak of the disease.

As the measles has spread in and around New York, so has anti-Semitism.

Amid an outbreak largely attributed to the anti-vax movement, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disclosed that, as of mid-May, 880 cases have been confirmed nationwide in 2019, “the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1994 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000.” Since September 2018, 535 cases have been confirmed in Brooklyn and Queens alone, largely concentrated in Orthodox Jewish communities. Another 247 cases have been confirmed in Rockland County, north of New York City, also largely among Orthodox Jews.

The spread of measles is matched by a twin pathology. Since the start of the latest measles outbreak last fall, the Anti-Defamation League has seen a spike in reports of harassment specifically related to measles, yet another expression of rising anti-Semitism in the U.S.: pedestrians crossing the street to get away from visibly Jewish people, bus drivers barring Jews from boarding, and people tossing out slurs such as “dirty Jew.”

“Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy,” and 29 other lessons from seeing my Harvard class of 1988 all grown up

On the weekend before the opening gavel of what’s being dubbed the Harvard affirmative-action trial, a record-breaking 597 of my fellow members of the class of ’88 and I, along with alumni from other reunion classes, were seated in a large lecture hall, listening to the new president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, address the issue of diversity in the admissions process. What he said—and I’m paraphrasing, because I didn’t record it—was that he could fill five whole incoming classes with valedictorians who’d received a perfect score on the SAT, but that’s not what Harvard is or will ever be. Harvard tries—and succeeds, to my mind—to fill its limited spots with a diversity not only of race and class but also of geography, politics, interests, intellectual fields of study, and worldviews.

Smith College’s annual commencement ceremony begins like any other: Graduating seniors at the women’s liberal-arts college are called up one by one to collect their diploma from the president. Perhaps some students exchange a wink with the regalia-clad honorary-degree recipients nearby as they stride across a platform overlooking the dorms they’d for years called home; others may pause to flip their cap’s tassel while blowing a kiss to the sea of parents who have long awaited this milestone commemorating their daughter’s metamorphosis from undergraduate to alumna.

Except the moment, technically, hasn’t happened quite yet: The name, degree, and accolades printed inside each padded holder seldom belong to the woman who receives it. They very likely belong, rather, to one of her nearly 700 classmates.

SpaceX and its competitors plan to envelop the planet with thousands of small objects in the next few years.

In 1957, a beach-ball-shaped satellite hurtled into the sky and pierced the invisible line between Earth and space. As it rounded the planet, Sputnik drew an unseen line of its own, splitting history into distinct parts—before humankind became a spacefaring species, and after. “Listen now for the sound that will forevermore separate the old from the new,” one NBC broadcaster said in awe, and insistent that others join him. He played the staccato call from the satellite, a gentle beep beep beep.

Decades later, we are not as impressed with satellites. There have been thousands of other Sputniks. Instead of earning front-page stories, satellites stitch together the hidden linings of our daily lives, providing and powering too many basic functions to list. They form a kind of exoskeleton around Earth, which is growing thicker every year with each new launch.

To save the Church, Catholics must detach themselves from the clerical hierarchy—and take the faith back into their own hands.

To feel relief at my mother’s being dead was once unthinkable, but then the news came from Ireland. It would have crushed her. An immigrant’s daughter, my mother lived with an eye cast back to the old country, the land against which she measured every virtue. Ireland was heaven to her, and the Catholic Church was heaven’s choir. Then came the Ryan Report.

Not long before The Boston Globe began publishing its series on predator priests, in 2002—the “Spotlight” series that became a movie of the same name—the government of Ireland established a commission, ultimately chaired by Judge Sean Ryan, to investigate accounts and rumors of child abuse in Ireland’s residential institutions for children, nearly all of which were run by the Catholic Church.